


Invictus

by justbygrace



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/M, Police AU, Torture, explicit violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-02
Updated: 2017-04-02
Packaged: 2018-10-13 20:43:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,949
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10521486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justbygrace/pseuds/justbygrace
Summary: Ten x Rose. Police!AU.Please heed the warnings - I'm serious about them.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is one of the last stories I wrote before I stopped writing regularly - I had started exploring darker and darker themes.

Rose Tyler's day had started out so well. She'd woken up on time and was even able to get in a good run and a stop at her favorite cafe for a cup of coffee. Her head was brimming with new ideas to catch the killer - he signed his crime scenes Davros - who was terrorizing the city's citizens by night and she practically skipped into the station, eager to share her ideas with her partner in justice - Jack Harkness. Which is when Jack informed her in an undertone that Harriet Jones - their chief - had called in Torchwood and her whole day went to hell.

She was all set to march into Harriet's office and give her a piece of her mind about not needing any snooty government agents snooping around her case when Harriet stuck her head around the corner and summoned Rose to her office. It was not nearly as satisfying to march into the room invited, but Rose squared her shoulders and did her best. The room was also occupied by a man in a ridiculously long overcoat and a woman with ginger hair. Harriet started in on the standard joint investigation speech which Rose tuned out in favor of watching the man prowl about the room peering at things, pulling books off the shelf, and generally paying no better attention to the politics coming out of Harriet's mouth than Rose was.

Her attention hurriedly snapped back to Harriet when she heard her name in conjunction with some Doctor and the word partner. It turned out that the Doctor was the man of unnaturally long limbs and he was going to be shadowing Rose throughout the rest of the case. She was ill-pleased at this turn of events, but he looked thrilled, shaking her hand with gusto and then practically twirling out of the office in a flash of coat. Rose gave Harriet a dark look and followed on his heels.

Within fifteen minutes Rose hated him. He was in her way, chattering a mile a minute about everything from bananas to Douglas Adams and demanding to know in excruciating detail every single thing they had done in regards to Davros and everything they had plans to do and Rose was half convinced he was only a half-second away from demanding her entire life story. Donna - the ginger woman - seemed to be able to have him on a leash of sorts, at least she could get him back on track when his stories diverged into the woods never to be seen again and actually smacked his hand when he reached for his third pastry in fifteen minutes.

By the end of the day, Rose had forgotten she had ever been in a good mood in her entire life. The Doctor's continuous ramblings had given her a headache, Jack's innuendo-laced jokes (annoying on a good day) were getting unbearable, and they were no closer to a lead on Davros than they had been before the Doctor and Donna had arrived. Rose left the station in a foul temper, convinced that if she'd had the day to quietly strategize, she would have come up with more ideas.

Her phone rang at two am, waking her up from a dream wherein a bunch of over-sized cats wearing hospital gowns chased her through the streets of Paris and she blearily answered it to hear Jack telling her to get herself across town immediately; Davros had struck again. She threw on clothes and grabbed her sidearm and was navigating the drunken early morning traffic twenty minutes later, arriving at the crime scene in an even worse mood than she had left the station only to find the Doctor already there.

He was looking very wide awake, juggling three cups of coffee and chattering a mile a minute to a very testy looking Owen Harper, the medical examiner. Rose accepted the coffee cup that the Doctor thrust at her in something of a daze before shaking herself and snapping into work mode, demanding that someone bring her up to speed. It was a grim scene, precisely the way Davros liked it, a young person (male this time - he frequently switched that part up) bound and gagged with a plethora of burn wounds and obvious marks from having been restrained.

Jack was on the scene moments later and the two fell into their normal routine, making sure that the scene was well-secured, witnesses interviewed, and the CSI team had plenty of room to work. The Doctor, meanwhile, was a complete pain. He insisted on asking his own inane questions of passers-by, peering at everything, cracking several jokes in very poor taste, and actually sticking his finger in some oily substance and tasting it. By the time the sun was coming up, Rose was ready to scream. She no longer had any doubt as to why Torchwood had such a bad rep if they had incompetent fools like him working for them.

It started raining just as they reached the station and the day only got worse from there. The Doctor was hardly more than a few centimeters from her elbow at any given time, demanding to know everything she was doing and thinking and she just barely kept him from accompanying her to the loo. The mood inside reflected the dismal weather; even with the fresh crime scene, new leads seemed pretty non-existent. Doctor Harper called them to Autopsy late in the afternoon, but it was only to confirm what they already knew; the victim had been kept for several days undergoing severe electrical torture before finally being shocked to death sometime the previous afternoon. They ended the day no closer to discovering Davros' identity than they had at its start.

The next few days dragged. No fresh bodies were reported for which Rose was thankful, but she knew that Davros had probably already snatched a new victim and was currently torturing him or her. The Doctor was no less annoying, though his outgoing personality and knack for fixing broken equipment was making him very well liked around the station. Personally, she still found him grating, annoying, frustrating, aggravating and a whole lot of other -ing words that she no longer had the energy to remember.

Jack was sympathetic to her plight, after all, no one but her was forced to take the Doctor with her on every new development and to every interview, but even his sympathy eventually turned into not-so-subtle jokes about the Doctor's great bum. Which, if it was great, Rose certainly hadn't noticed; she had more important things on her mind than his bum or his really great hair or his angular features or his ridiculously long limbs or any other aspect of his physical appearance that other people might find attractive. And as long as people were making lists of utterly useless things, he was also, when he wanted to be, a good conversationalist, quickly gained the ability to make her crack a smile, was a handy Poker player, and had a working knowledge of seemingly every dictionary and encyclopedia known to man.

The break in the case came nearly three weeks after the Doctor and Donna had arrived in town. A bit of DNA evidence came back to a Mister Caan, a man on the inside ring with high-ranking officials and not someone that Rose wanted to tangle with lightly. She checked and re-checked that every bit of evidence had gone through the proper chain and that no possible suspicion could be thrown on the investigation. Then, and only then, did she and Jack (and the Doctor and Donna) pay Mister Caan a visit. The meeting did not go well, Caan said a lot of pretty things, but once he realized how much evidence they had against him, lawyered up.

On the way back to the station the Doctor chattered non-stop about how positive he was that it was Caan and how there was just something off about him and how they should go get a warrant immediately. Rose stood it for as long as she could and then shouted at him about probable cause and procedures and could he please shut up for five bloody minutes so she could think. For once he did, so successfully that Rose vaguely worried that she might have actually hurt his feelings, but her head was hurting and she really did have a lot on her mind and so she ignored the niggling of her conscience.

The evidence they had turned out not to be enough for a warrant and it was nearly midnight when Rose decided to walk home; she needed the time to clear her head and she lived only a few minutes from the station. The Doctor had been very quiet since she had blown up at him, for once staying in the background, and she reminded herself to apologize to him in the morning; he didn't deserve her anger, no matter how annoying he might have been. She was only a few blocks from her flat when she felt a sharp pain to the back of her head and she fell to her knees, desperately reaching for her gun, but she was hit from behind again and the world went black.

When she awoke, she was chained to a wall, blindfolded and naked. She immediately tried to struggle against the bonds, but whoever had bound her had done their work well, she couldn't move an inch. By the time they came for her, she had rubbed her wrists and ankles raw. They removed the blindfold and set her up on a metal table. Looking up, she caught a glimpse of herself in the ceiling - there was a mirror installed to ensure she wouldn't miss a moment.

Rose recognized the faces surrounding her, four men who were regular features in the world of politics, Caan's smirking face front and center. They were deliberate, shaving the sides of her hair to make room for the adhesive electrodes, attaching each wire precisely where it was sure to cause her the most pain. She was determined not to let them see her agony, but the moment they hit the power switch all thought of stoicism was forgotten. Distantly she could hear herself screaming for someone, anyone to rescue her, to end the excruciating pain.

When she came to, she was chained once more to the wall. Every nerve ending was on fire, every breath was agony. Eventually they returned to taunt, mocking her failure to identify them, and rewarding her attempts at silence with electric prods. The darkness, when it finally took her, was a mercy she welcomed with open arms and a bloodied scream.

She lost track of how often she awoke and was subjected to their torture before passing out once more. The hours ran together, a endless march of pain and mocking and fear and anger and distress. Somehow she knew the end was near, could sense that it was taking less time for her succumb to the electric shocks and more time to wake up between sessions. Somewhere inside she could feel regrets, but most of them were forgotten in her desire for the pain to just...stop.

The last time they came for her she could not hold her head up, submitting to their twisting of her limbs with little care about anything. In some tiny part of her brain she registered that the voltage they were setting up was higher than it had been, but she couldn't bring herself to care. They attached the electrodes with greater care than they had been using and moved away to throw the switch one last time. And then somewhere she could hear a commotion, guns firing, people screaming, and then Jack was there and the Doctor and someone was saying her name over and over and she tried to move, but the world was tilting and somebody was screaming for an ambulance and she knew no more.

She awoke in a hospital room surrounded by bright lights and faces she didn't recognize and she could hear someone screaming and right before a needle went into her arm, it occurred to her that it was her own throat the sound was issuing from. The next time she regained consciousness it was much darker and there were a great deal less people. In fact, there was only one, the Doctor and his hands were clenched in her bedclothes and there were wrinkles where there previously had been none and dark circles under his eyes.

Rose opened her mouth to speak, but it hurt too much. He got her a glass of water with a straw and started speaking. She drifted to sleep before he could finish, but the next time she woke up, he picked up the story. Gradually, over the period of several cycles of sleep and wakefulness, she was able to get the gist of what had happened.

Davros was the code name for a group known as the Cult of Skaro. Apparently they were an exclusive club of rich and powerful men whose chief source of entertainment was torturing and killing people. They had been going on unchecked for years, but one of their members had apparently gained part of a conscience because he had started dumping the bodies in increasingly public places and, after they had captured Rose, had called in several anonymous tips about her location.

The Doctor's voice was tight as he told her that it had been nearly four days before they had found her and how they had almost been too late. There, his voice broke and he told her that he was so very, very sorry. Rose was unsure what he was apologizing for and managed to ask him in a raw voice what he meant. He referenced the day they had questioned Caan and how if he hadn't been such an insufferable arse none of this would have happened. She gave him a tiny smile, whispering that he hadn't been the only insufferable one before drifting back to sleep.

The next time she awoke she felt a little stronger and the time after that stronger yet and by the morning of the third day, she felt well enough to get out of bed and try to walk a few steps. Many of her friends and colleagues had been to see her, but the Doctor had been a constant presence at her side, trying to anticipate anything she might want or need. It was still a little annoying and she sent him on several ridiculous errands just to get some peace and quiet, but mostly it was a comfort to have someone around when the nightmares slashed through her sleep.

She was released a week and a half after she had been admitted. The burns on her body had begun to show signs of healing, though she knew she would bear the scars for the rest of her life. The Doctor was by her side, of course, as she entered the lift to ride down to the ground floor. He had told her that Jack had called with a heads up, the media had somehow caught wind of her release and was on hand in droves to hear her story. She wasn't sure what she was going to say, but she was determined to speak a few words to the cameras and that resolve lasted all the way up until the lift doors opened and she caught side of the crowd outside of the hospital.

Her hand tightened in the Doctor's, hardly having been aware that she had grasped it, and she took a step backwards, her whole body shaking as she contemplated facing that mob. Gradually she became aware of his soothing voice in her ear, telling her they didn't have to do this, she didn't have to do this. His words eventually helped to calm her racing heart and she turned to look at him, begging him without words to rescue her. His smile started small and then grew as he pulled off his coat and tossed it around her shoulders and tugged her towards a wheelchair. Once she was settled, he directed them down a short corridor and out a side door into an alley where she recognized his faded blue pick-up truck.

He helped settle her into the passenger seat before climbing into his own seat. They were both quiet as he navigated the back way to the station, but as he pulled into a parking spot she started shaking again. He put the truck in park and turned to face her, using their joined hands (and she wasn't sure how that kept happening) to gently maneuver her until he could wrap his arms around her, mindful of her battered body.

She became aware that she was crying only after his shirtsleeve was soaked through and by then she no longer cared. Slowly, haltingly, she told him that she wasn't ready to face everyone, not now, not yet. He pressed a kiss to the crown of her head and, keeping one arm around her waist, pulled the truck smoothly out of the car park and into traffic, promising her that he would take her somewhere far away.

As she watched the scenery fly by, she knew that eventually she would need to come back. There was the trial to consider - she was not willing to let the monsters go free because of her fear - not to mention her friends and family in the area, but for the moment, she was content where she was, facing forward with the strong steady heartbeat of her Doctor beneath her cheek.


End file.
